This thesis aims to provide an in-depth and trans-genre analysis of depictions of love and desire between women in Italian literature between the end of the fourteenth and the first decades of the seventeenth centuries. One of its aspirations is to deconstruct and discredit the belief in the invisibility and impossibility of desire and affection between women in early modern Italian literature.

This thesis, therefore, argues that discourses on attraction and love between women are more frequent and multi-faceted than previously acknowledged. Furthermore, it demonstrates that writers use the motif of woman-woman love to provocatively engage with their audience for a variety of reasons (such as erotically titillating their voyeurism or provoking their laughter) as well as to convey a multiplicity of messages, spanning from criticism of social and religious moralism to the defence of women’s dignity